Using up my fabric stash, one scrap at a time!

I fell in love with this little set of drawers when I saw it in a charity shop a few years ago, and still remember triumphantly carrying it home, after getting it for a very good price indeed.

Mr B and the boy curse these drawers, as lots of different things are kept in each drawer, but no one remembers which drawer holds what, so we inevitably find ourselves having to open and close each drawer as we search desperately for sellotape, a stapler or new batteries.

Over the years I have been slowly changing the little knobs for different interesting ones that I find on Ebay or little boutique shops. It still seemed just a little bit worn and sad looking, so I finally decided to give it a lick of paint and a little update. I got a tin of Everlong paint in ‘Cricket Pitch’ green, and painted the body of the chest of drawers. Everlong paint is a superior chalk paint inspired by the beauty of Northumberland,and I have to say it was difficult to choose just one colour, I wanted to buy all the colours and paint everything in the house. 🙂

I was very impressed with the paint, I have never used chalk paint before, always just slapping on whatever emulsion I already had, or using tester pots of paint and varnishing over the top, but this paint was very easy to use, doesn’t require primer or sanding (although I did sand down the chest of drawers as it was so battered and I wanted to smooth the surfaces). What amazed me was how quickly it dried too, even though I was painting in the freezing conservatory in the middle of October. I managed to do three coats in one afternoon. I decided to stain all the drawers, instead of painting them, and used Ronseal interior wax in Walnut finish, and I love the end result!

I am very excited! Expecting my second son in two month’s time, I couldn’t wait to get started on making some little baby things! First up is a little baby quilt, one that is small enough to transport around and put on the floor anywhere to put him down on.

The funnest thing about this project was choosing the fabric (who doesn’t like a good excuse to buy new fabric?!) and I ended up buying a bundle of fat quarters off Ebay, in a pale green theme. I also cheated with the bias binding, using some pre-made stuff that I bought ages ago in bulk. I chose some quite thick wadding for this quilt, thicker than any of the other quilts I have made, as I wanted it to be nice and soft even on hard floors.

I actually sewed all the patches together while on holiday in France, in a little secluded forest cabin, and then finished it off once I came home. I love how it has turned out, and have already cut up all my squares for another baby quilt, this one to go in the cot, which I will blog about soon!

After accepting Mr. B’s proposal, I just had to get started on some wedding projects! First thing we did was find the right venue for us, which took quite a bit of searching and looking, but eventually we found the perfect place, an old mill that had a licence to conduct civil ceremonies, and which you could hire out for the whole weekend and included accommodation for all your guests. Once we had booked the venue and the registrar I got busy with my first wedding project, making the save the date cards! This was really fun, and I knew I wanted them to be like old fashioned circus tickets, so hit Pinterest and searched away for some inspiration. There were loads of good ideas on Pinterest, and I took inspiration from a few in particular and then got to work designing my own cards on GIMP. I printed them on heavy brown card and then used a circular hole punch to punch out the corners. I even used a needle to mimic the perforated edge of the ticket stub. We have decided on a small wedding so it didn’t take too long as I only had about 30 of these to make!

I am very pleased and excited to announce that the lovely Mr. B and I are getting married! He proposed in a field on one of our camping and climbing trips last year, and of course I said yes!

Since then, we have been busily planning our wedding, which will be in August, and making loads of things for it!

With both Mr. B and I being keep makers and creators, of course the wedding will have to have lots of DIY elements to it, and plenty of resourceful little ideas too!

I am sorry I haven’t blogged for so long, it’s really hard to get back into it once you let it slip I have found. I am determined to blog about all the wedding crafts and projects that we have done though, so that might spur me back into more regular posting!

This summer we went on our annual climbing and camping trip to France, and before we left I decided to quickly make a big double quilt to take with us and keep us cozy at night. Keeping with the spirit of using up my scraps this year, I looked through my fabric stash and pulled out lots of the darker colours. I figured I might as well make it a darker quilt to hide any possible camping dirt 😀 and it turned out I had quite a bit of purples, reds, blues and turquoise fabric that would do the job nicely. Because I only had a week to make this quilt, I opted for quite large squares. I did end up buying the fabric to back the quilt, but the cotton sheeting fabric was on sale and it cost me under £2, so I figured it was worth it!

I also bought two narrow feather pillows and made some pillow cases to go with the quilt, and I have to say it was very cozy at night in our tent, and far nicer than just sleeping in slippery narrow sleeping bags. We also used to quilt to wrap up in in the evenings after supper, while we stargazed outside. It was big enough for the three of us to keep warm under, and it will definitely be a permanent part of all future camping trips.

I made these simple macrame knot bracelets recently as I loved the colours of the knotting cord and wanted to make some thinner more elegant bracelets than my usual chunky beaded ones.

It was a struggle to get the tiny gold plated spacer beads onto the cord at first, and then I remembered the trick my friend Sally (who owns The Beaderie in Cambridge) uses of putting nail polish on the end of the cord to make it stiffer. Once I had done that it was a doddle to quickly thread the beads on and then tie the macrame knots either side of them and add a slider knot fastening at the end to get them open and closed.

I like them. What do you think? If you fancy making some like this you can buy everything you need online at the Beaderie.

You will need 2 metres of this nylon Chinese knotting cord which costs 20p per metre and a pack of these gold plated spacer beads (50 for 95p). Of course you could make them with any beads along the middle, or even with a long tube bead instead. Happy jewellery-making!

And finally I am back to blog about my second patchwork quilt that I talked about in my last post. We’ll gloss over the time-delay for now, as I want to get on with explaining how I made all the patchwork squares for this quilt! In case you didn’t read my last post, I made this quilt using nothing but my smallest pieces of scrap fabric (probably the kind of scraps most people would throw away). I cut my scraps into 2 inch squares and stored them all up, and then used 1620 squares to construct the quilt, which is big enough to cover a single bed.

The quilt is arranged in 45 blocks of 36 patchwork squares, and in order to sew all 36 patchwork pieces together with the seams lined up I found a brilliant technique online that I used. The technique involves ironing all 36 patchwork squares onto a piece of iron-on interfacing, that I had drawn a 36 square grid on, then ironing a seam down each row and column where the squares of fabric met, and then sewing along each ironed line, trimming the edge and ironing the seam open, and then repeating for the next row. I don’t think I am explaining it very well, so hopefully the photos will explain it all a bit better!

colourful offcut scraps

As you can see in the photos I added strips of white in between the patchwork blocks, and a wider boarder of white all around it. I also made the binding using up all of my strips of yellow scrap fabric sewn together into enough binding to go round the whole quilt. I will post finished pictures of the quilt with the binding in my next post (I just need to photograph the finished quilt). The quilt is backed with an old white tablecloth I bought at a charity shop for 50p (I knew it would come in handy one day!). The quilt is not perfect, and my machine quilting is not very good yet, but I still love the finished quilt, it is the perfect size for Mr. B and I to snuggle up under on the sofa in the colder evenings, and it has massively reduced my stash of very scrappy small scrap fabric, yay!